Mario Schifano

(Homs 1934 – Rome 1998)

Aquatic, 1988

Acrylic and enamel on canvas, 150.6 x 200.2 cm

Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, Franco Farina Collection. Franco Farina and Lola Bonora donation, i nv. 8279

A leading figure on the international pop scene, Mario Schifano made his debut as a self-taught artist in the informal painting of the post-World War II period. Sojourns in the United States, starting in 1962, brought him into contact with neo-Dadaist research and nascent pop art, and stimulated an interest in mass communication languages, reflected in the famous cycles dedicated to brands Coca Cola and It. Negli anni Sessanta e Settanta Schifano rivisita a più riprese la storia dell’arte, dal futurismo a Magritte a De Chirico, anticipando il citazionismo che si diffonde negli anni Ottanta, e parallelamente estende la sua ricerca a media extrapittorici, come quello cinematografico. Quando l’artista torna alla pratica tradizionale del pennello, nel clima neoespressionista degli anni Ottanta, prosegue la sua riflessione sulla storia della pittura, con cicli come Water lilies. Aquatic springs from a desire to challenge a giant of modern painting such as Claude Monet in his celebrated cycle dedicated to the Giverny pond. Similar to the father of Impressionism, Schifano coats the canvas in an arabesque of ringing marks to evoke the play of surface reflections of water. But just as water returns ambiguous images, where what lies on the bottom is superimposed, what floats on the surface and what is reflected there, so art and media are inevitably illusory mirrors of the reality they are meant to represent.

The work belonged to Franco Farina, director of Ferrara’s Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna and of Palazzo dei Diamanti ‘s exhibition programming from the 1960s to the early 1990s, who in 1989 dedicated an anthological exhibition to the artist at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea curated by Achille Bonito Oliva. In 2019 it was donated to the Ferrara museums by his widow, Lola Bonora, along with other works from her husband’s collection.